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Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets

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Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets More Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets Thomas Traherne by John Thomson Other literary forms The reputation of Thomas Traherne (truh-HURN) is based primarily on his religious w orks, both in poetry and prose. His treatises include Roman Forgeries (1673); Christian Ethicks (1675); and the meditation Centuries of Meditations (1908). His w orks have been collected as The Works of Thomas Traherne (2005-2009). Achievements Thomas Traherne is usually categorized w ith the seventeenth century Metaphysical poets, Table of Contents although his poetry lacks the quality of w it that characterizes John Donne’s and George Herbert’s w ork. His poetry is religious and philosophical and bears closest comparison w ith that Other literary forms of Henry Vaughan, to w hom it w as attributed w hen first discovered in a London bookstall in Achievements 1896. Plato is the ultimate source of Traherne’s thinking, both in verse and prose, and his w orks demonstrate his reading of many other w riters in the Platonic tradition, including Saint Augustine, Biography Saint Bonaventure, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the Cambridge Platonists. Analysis Scholars have generally judged Traherne to be more interested in philosophy than poetry. Perhaps as a consequence, his prose w orks have received more critical attention than his Search for religious truth poetry, especially Centuries of Meditations, a devotional w ork in the Anglican tradition of Centuries of Meditations Lancelot Andrew es and Donne. Christian Ethicks, published the year after Traherne’s death, w as the only systematic treatise intended for the educated English layman to appear in the thirty Christian Ethicks years follow ing the Restoration. Because of the attention he paid to infant and childhood Traherne’s Poems of experiences and the importance he ascribed to them in the development of an understanding of Felicity divinity, Traherne has been suspected of the Pelagian heresy (w hich denies the doctrine of Original Sin). His name is frequently linked w ith such Romantic poets as William Blake and William Critical reception Wordsw orth, w ho also praised childhood innocence as the state in w hich humans are most Bibliography closely in touch w ith the eternal. Biography The few bits of information know n about Thomas Traherne’s life come principally from John Aubrey’s Miscellanies (1696), w hich reveals that Traherne w as tw ice visited by apparitions, and from Anthony à Wood’s Athenae Oxoniensus (1691-1692), w here he is identified as a son of John Traherne, a shoemaker w ho w as related to Philip Traherne, tw ice mayor of Hereford. Traherne also had a brother Philip, w ho revised and edited some of his poems. Traherne w as educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, w here he took his B.A. degree on October 13, 1656. He w as ordained and, on December 30, 1657, w as appointed to the Rectory at Credenhill, County Hereford. While at Credenhill, Traherne became spiritual adviser to Susanna Hopton. She had become a Roman Catholic after the execution of Charles I but rejoined the Church of England after the Restoration and became the center of a religious society for w hich Traherne w rote Centuries of Meditations. Hopton’s niece married Traherne’s brother Philip. Traherne returned to Oxford to take his M.A. on November 6, 1661, and his B.D. (Bachelor of Divinity) on December 11, 1669. In 1667, he became chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman, Keeper of the Seals in the Restoration. Traherne’s death occurred three months after his patron’s, and he w as buried beneath the reading desk in the church at Teddington on October 10, 1674. Roman Forgeries, the equivalent of a modern B.D. thesis, w as his only w ork published in his lifetime, although he w as preparing Christian Ethicks for publication at the time of his death. There may yet be more w orks of Traherne to be discovered; manuscripts of his w orks have come to light in 1964, 1981, and 1996-1997. Analysis Modern readers first encountered Thomas Traherne as a poet, and the publication of his poems fortuitously coincided w ith the renew ed interest in the seventeenth century poets signaled by H. J. C. Grierson’s 1912 edition of Donne. Although Traherne w as not included in Grierson’s famous 1921 anthology of Metaphysical poetry, he has alw ays been categorized w ith those poets, although in the second rank. Traherne might be surprised to find himself among the ranks of the poets at all, for his verse, at least as much of it as has been discovered, comprises only a portion of his know n w ritings, and there is reason to believe that he placed more importance on tw o of his prose w orks, Christian Ethicks and Centuries of Meditations. Thematically, and even stylistically, his poetry is of a piece w ith his prose, w hich deserves some consideration here, both for the light it throw s on his poetry and for its ow n sake. Widely and deeply read, intellectually eclectic, and religiously heterodox, Traherne reminds one of John Milton, w hom he preceded in death by less than a month. Both w ere modernists, sharing in the new Humanist emphasis of their era. Traherne, how ever, found a place in the established Church, something that the great Puritan poet w ould have found impossible. Traherne lacked the genius that made Milton an original, and readers of the younger poet are alw ays conscious of his debts to thinkers and w riters greater than he. He copied into his Commonplace Book from those w hom he especially admired, many of w hom are in the Platonic tradition, such as Hermes Trismegistus, w hose Divine Pymander Traherne copied in its 1657 English translation, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, from w hose Divine Dialogues (1668) Traherne copied extracts. Another unpublished manuscript (British Museum Manuscript Burney 126) is know n informally as the Ficino Notebook because it consists of extracts from Ficino’s Latin epitomes and translations of Plato. It also contains a long Latin life of Socrates and an otherw ise unidentified w ork titled “Stoicismus Christianus.” Traherne’s w ritings are almost exclusively religious, and the influence of Plato, w ithout w hom Christianity w ould be a very different religion, is therefore unsurprising. What is surprising is Traherne’s apparent acceptance of Platonic doctrines usually rejected by the Christian Fathers, such as the doctrine of the soul’s preexistence, and his modification of other doctrines, such as the traditional Platonic opposition of the material and spiritual w orlds, from their usual adaptation to Christian dogma. Hints of the soul’s memory of an existence previous to the earthly one is one of the motifs in Traherne’s poetry that reminds readers of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsw orth of the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Were it not for the fact that Traherne’s w ork w as not discovered until nearly fifty years after Wordsw orth’s death, scholars w ould doubtless have searched for the Trahernian influence on him. In Centuries of Meditations, 3.2, Traherne marvels, “Is it not strange that an infant should be heir of the w hole w orld, and see those mysteries w hich the books of the learned never unfold?” His exaltation of infancy and childhood in particular makes him seem a precursor of the Romantic movement. Like Wordsw orth, Traherne values childhood innocence because the “Infant-Ey,” as he says in a poem of that title, “Things doth see/ Ev’n like unto the Deity.” Attributing such pow er to the child requires, as he paradoxically says, “a learned and a Happy Ignorance” and is one of the indications that Traherne believed in the preexistence of the soul. Although he never expressly states such a belief, it can be inferred from his w ritings, particularly Centuries of Meditations and Christian Ethicks, w here he discusses other aspects of Neoplatonic mysticism. On the other hand, Traherne rejects the traditional Platonic preference for the ideal w orld over the real. In fact, Traherne holds that the spiritual w orld is enhanced by its physical actualization. Another w ay in w hich Traherne departs from strict Platonism is in his conception of time and eternity. For Platonic philosophers, time is the earthly, mortal image of eternity, but for Traherne, this is part of eternity, just as the physical w orld is part of God’s unified creation. Here again, Traherne is reacting against the medieval emphasis on the opposition betw een this w orld and the next, finding instead a reconciliation. His reaction to the Aristotelian dichotomies of the Scholastic philosophers is one of the affinities betw een Traherne and the Cambridge Platonists. He also shared their distaste for the Calvinist preoccupation w ith Original Sin and, like them, focused on humanity’s potential, through the exercise of reason, to achieve happiness. In fact, as more than one scholar has suggested, Traherne’s theology may have been Pelagian; his heavy stress on the pow er of childhood innocence almost requires a denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. Scholar Patrick Grant asserts that Traherne’s theology is indebted to Saint Irenaeus, one of the pre-Nicene Fathers to w hom the Cambridge Platonists also looked for a method w hereby pagan philosophy could be incorporated into Christianity. Scholar Stanley Stew art finds Traherne aligned w ith the Arminians at Oxford w ho struck a balance betw een Pelagian “secularism” and Calvinistic determinism. Traherne’s emphasis on humanity’s potential for creation, w hich humanity shares w ith God, and his slight attention to sin, certainly distinguish him from Donne and Herbert.
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